SEO for your Squarespace Online Shop
During busy seasons for your shop, such as Christmas, it's extra important to make sure that your online shop is set up for success. You've taken the time to create your website and uploaded all of your products you want to be sure that they get found by the right people.
It’s not just a case of uploading product images, adding a product name and a price, there is lots you can do to make the most of your online shop. This includes making it as easy as possible for your potential customers to browse and engage with and also making sure you have added search engine optimisation.
On page SEO for your online shop
As with most SEO tips, they are based on the principles of good user design. The most important thing is always making sure you customers can easily engage with your website, meaning they know where they need to go, they can find what they are looking for and know how to take the next steps - as in adding to cart and making a purchase.
Page Title & Description
This begins with adding a title to your shop page, one that is slightly more creative than ‘Shop’. Think about the most descriptive words for your shop and use them within the page title, remembering to set the style to be a Heading 1, so that Google know it’s the most important text on the page. Follow this up with a couple of sentences that back up that title, giving more context for your products and helpful information to your customers.
Be descriptive with your product title
It can be tempting to give your products a creative or catchy name, rather than something that might come across as a bit boring or dull. I don’t think this is necessarily a bad idea, as it can help enhance your branding, but I recommend using this name in your product description and using the product title to be as plain and clear as possible. If you think about it Google, or your ideal customer, don’t know what that creative name actually means, and they certainly won’t be putting it into a Google search unless they’re already familiar with the product. So keep things extremely clear and simple.
Write an engaging product description
Your product description should grab the attention of your potential customers by speaking directly to them and highlighting the benefits of the product.
In the example in the video masterclass above, I used the following structure:
An opening statement that includes the product keywords, talks about how the item can be used and appeals to the emotions of the customer.
Specifications and details about the product - colour, size, style, etc.
Bullet point list of the benefits of the product.
You can share more details about the product using the ‘Additional Info’ section in the Squarespace product editor, which I’ve talked about below.
Product images best practice
Your images should be high quality and consistent. If you don’t have the budget to work with a professional photographer keep things simple. Make sure your images are well lit and pick a consistent background to use behind your products. People will make their initial snap judgement on whether or not to learn more about a product based on the photographs so you don’t want to get this step wrong.
Your images should also be optimised for your website. This means making sure the file size is under 500kb, really as small as possible without losing the quality of the image. The dimensions for the image should be under 2500px, anywhere between 1500px and 2500px is a good sweet spot.
Name your images to reflect what the image is of. For example, an image of a red and white Christmas mug, sold by a business called Mugs Are Us (…not feeling very creative today!) should be named red-white-christmas-mug-mugs-are-us.jpg
Simple product categories
Don’t go too crazy with your product categories. I recommend trying to figure out the least amount of categories possible, that still allows for easy filtering and navigation of your products for your customer.
You can also create categories for linking in a menu, but actually hide them in the category list on your shop page. To do that, click the gear icon to access shop settings, select Categories, then click the three dots to the right of the category you want to hide, then toggle the button next to Filter Visibility. That means you can still link to that category but it won’t appear on the main shop page list of categories.
Related post: Simple SEO tips for your website
SEO features within Squarespace
There are a number of built in SEO features within the Squarespace that we can take advantage of, I’ve highlighted them below so you don’t miss them out!
SEO Page Title & Description
Within your shop page settings, you will see an SEO tab. This allows you to override the page title you have given in (which may be simple like ‘shop’) and add in more detailed keywords, similar to the title you used on the actual page.
Note: Sometimes when you add a new shop page in Squarespace, it will auto-generate an SEO title of something like ‘Store 2’, which will appear as the page name in your browser (right at the very top left). This is where you can change that name.
You can also add an SEO description. By default, Google will use the first text it finds on the page to populate what is displayed within its search results page. If you would like this to be more specific and keyword heavy, you can add a short description here.
SEO Product Title & Description
As with the actual shop page, each product also includes an SEO tab within it’s settings section where you can again specify the text that will appear on the search engine results page.
Related Products
To encourage customers to buy multiple items and to stay on your website for longer, I like to enable the ‘Related Products’ feature within Squarespace. This will show your customer similar or newly added products at the bottom of your product page. You can set this up to display a single category, to display your featured products or simply a random selection.
To turn this feature on, head to the Commerce section of the site, select Related Product and toggle the button to turn it on.
Additional Info
You can add further descriptions, images, videos and customers reviews to your product pages by using the Additional Info feature within the Product Editor. This allows you to use any of the Squarespace blocks that you would use on a standard web page to make your product page more engaging and interesting.
If you are selling a higher value product, it will be useful to give your customers as much information as possible. For example:
If you sell jewellery you can use this section to add images and descriptions of the gems or metals that you use.
You could add customers photos of your product in use.
Add a Summary block to create a carousel of customer reviews
Embed a video of your product being used
Tags
Tags are slightly different from categories. Where categories are used by Squarespace to help filter and organise your products, tags are best used to add in additional keywords to your products. Rather than simple, single words that you would use as categories, under tags you can use those short statements or search terms that you have discovered during your keyword research phase. These can be added to and updated over time, as seasons and trends change.
I hope this helps you make the most of your online shop and encourages as many sales as possible across from your customers!
If you are interested in working together on an e-commerce website for your business, please get in touch at the link below.
